Austerity, Then & Now

At a very personal, selfish level, I don't really care how "austere" the government decides to become. I don't have any real skin in the game, other than the increasingly perilous adventure of trying to drive on California's potholed roads. America doesn't really have any public amenities which are threatened by greater austerity; for example, we don't have a real passenger rail system, or much of anything in the way of public transportation. The conditions of accommodations and facilities (bathrooms, etc.) in national and state parks are usually a complete disgrace, and so forth. The graffiti-strewn walls, the urban blight, the shitty, cheap, tawdry look of so much of what's been built in this country in the last 60 years, are all reflections of the people who live here, their aesthetic criteria, their social mores. It's how we live and we've all gotten used to it. The public realm in general in the United States is a vast wasteland, in fact, and is the emblem of our governing ethos; to wit, beauty and grace in life are "private virtues" which must be earned and purchased. You must amass enough money to buy your own sylvan enclave, or your house on the beach, in order to escape the crapscape (h/t: James Kunstler) of American life in general. Amazingly, the financial elites who own such an overwhelmingly large proportion of the wealth in this country, and can afford to insulate themselves from the trash heap, have enlisted the help of the some of the most disadvantaged (the Tea Party types and Southern Rednecks, not always the same people) to assist them in enforcing this way of doing things. Thus, the Tea Party has as one of its main platform planks the perpetuation of the "Bush tax cuts," as if such a top-margin benefit could possibly help them at all.

When the public realm is in such a catastrophic state, the key strategic move is to insulate yourself as much as possible from its effects. Although I'm eligible for Social Security now, I don't draw on it; I continue working. I'm too young for Medicare, and I'm self-employed, so I will never receive a penny in unemployment, welfare, public pension, or (currently) government-furnished health care. Thus, I read the weekly reports of new UE (unemployment claims) and even the unemployment numbers themselves (since I will never be counted one way or the other) with a great measure of personal detachment. In a way, none of this has anything to do with me.

I have a lot of company in this state of societal anomie, of course. Millions and millions of people, just like me. Working stiffs with no safety net all. As I said a few posts back, the sense of national "cohesion" in this country is in an advanced state of deterioration. We're kind of a mixture of a Hong Kong-style economy, with a manic desire for deregulation and anything-goes entrepreneurship, and a Greek-style approach to complete fiscal irresponsibility and mass tax avoidance. The same financial elites who own the government and manipulate the Right Wing booboisie (h/t: H.L. Mencken) with empty slogans and rhetoric favor complete deregulation, except when they blow themselves up and need hallucinated "money" to restore them to "balance," and otherwise advocate absolute minimization of any financial support for the country of which they are nominally a part.

Thus, what does "austerity" have to do with anything anymore? The financial elites are just as happy to borrow money on the "credit" of the Treasury as the so-called "liberals." The budget cutting antics of the Republicans are simply Kabuki theater. They know, and we know, and they know that we know, that the paltry reductions they are suggesting will do absolutely nothing to avert American bankruptcy. Their frivolous posturing, however, does impress some of the rubes in the cheap seats, who are too lazy, ignorant and ill-informed to perform the very simple math involved in assessing national income (about $2.2 trillion, the subtrahend), comparing it to national spending (about $3.8 trillion, the minuend), producing a difference of $1.6 trillion. Now let's do some more math: $100 billion/$1.6 trillion = 1/16 = 6.25% of the budget deficit. This is the House Tea Party contingent's big proposal, this is their extreme position, the one that may shut the government down.

Goldman Sachs, that company famous for doing God's work here in His Earthly Kingdom (God, I mean, not Lloyd Blankfein), recently prognosticated that a $50 billion reduction in federal spending would produce a 1% reduction in national GDP. Now, G-Sax is not exactly bearish on American prospects, since part of their scam is to encourage the endless funneling of money from the Federal Reserve into Wall Street, the better to "stimulate" the economy into "recovery." In a linear extrapolation, this would imply that $100 billion (the aforesaid 6.25% "slashing") would cause a 2% loss in GDP, or the current estimate of the entire growth for 2011 (revised downward recently, since the government has begun to notice that despite their rosy UE stats, no one is actually working). Let us continue this morning's math session. Assuming this same linear extrapolation holds for greater amounts of budget "cutting," what would be the effect on the economy of doing the only rational thing, living within our actual means? Well, let's figure it out. If $50 billion = 1%, then since $1.6 trillion is 32 times larger than $50 billion, G-Sax is implying that a balanced budget would result in a 32% fall in GDP. How much did the GDP of the United States fall during the depth of the Great Depression? Answer: 30%.

Such ruminations may suggest to you just how utterly phony this so-called American economic "recovery" actually is, and why despite all of the fake number crunching at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the country has not actually produced any new full-time jobs for the populace in over ten years. We are sustaining the economy with the same false source of prosperity (massive debt) which fueled the run-up to the crash in 2007-08, only now it is the public sector which is pulling the laboring oar on the slave-galley ship of penury.

Thus, there won't be any austerity. There can't be, because the political class cannot face the ruinous consequences implied in their own austerity rhetoric. They'll run this scam in Washington as long as humanly possible, they'll use every trick in the book, they'll print money, ship it to England, and pretend that the "UK" is buying American Treasury bonds, along with the Federal Reserve, which is already printing money to "buy" bonds from Primary Dealers, who in turn often had just closed the purchase themselves a few moments before, pretending that this indicates bond-buying "interest."

Austerity, like prosperity in this country, will eventually become a "private virtue." It will be what we have left. Thus, 'tis best to cultivate an attitude of mind which anticipates such a state of affairs. The Zen of detachment, an austerity of expectation.

Raise High the Tax Level, Carpenters

Faithful reader JM weighs in with the question about raising taxes. There are, after all, two approaches to balancing the budget. My own sense is that there is enough money sloshing around in the American economy to achieve a federal balance without significantly damaging the Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous. It would take two significant moves: One, an increase in the top marginal rate paid by the pluto-oligarchs; and Two, a more rational approach to defense spending which would reduce the outlay to, say, the $500 billion level (and that's everything, tips, gratuities, even the gift bags). To solve Social Security, the cap on the maximum income subject to FICA tax needs to be raised and perhaps titrated, year-by-year, to achieve a balance between outgo and income. And the health care system needs to be nationalized.

The Pluto-Oligarchs will, naturally, point to the following chart, which demonstrates that about 70% of all income taxes are already paid by the top 10%. This fact, of course, tends to demonstrate that income inequality in the United States has reached obscene, Gilded Age levels. Caricatures of the very rich come easily to mind. Do they really need 5 vacation homes when 4 should get the job done? Is it necessary to travel by helicopter to the Hamptons when a chauffeured limo is cheaper? If John McCain isn't even certain how many houses his heiress/USC cheerleader wife owns, isn't that an indication of excess and not just of mental vacuity?

Percentiles Ranked by AGI	AGI Threshold on Percentiles	Percentage of Federal Personal Income Tax Paid
Top 1%	$380,354	38.02
Top 5%	$159,619	58.72
Top 10%	$113,799	69.94
Top 25%	$67,280	86.34
Top 50%	$33,048	97.30
Bottom 50%	<$33,048	2.7

I would answer that just because the wealthy are paying a lot (relative to the total paid) does not mean they are paying enough. It all comes down to a question of what kind of country we actually want, which is an oblique way of saying: what happened to the concept of patriotism in this country? Why do the rich, through their army of lobbyists, want to hamstring the federal government through relentlessly lowering the top marginal rates (and why does the Crypto-Republican, Barack Obama, play along)?

One idea I have is that modern American politicians, such as the aforementioned Mr. Obama, wear the American flag lapel pins popularized by the Bush-era Gauleiters to remind themselves that they are, in fact, Americans. It's not always obvious. The move to globalization, the tax breaks for offshoring companies, the preference for spending money in places like Iraq and Afghanistan instead of Detroit and Baltimore, confuse the issue of just whose interests they're really serving. Increasingly, I get the idea that patriotism in this country is not only the last refuge of scoundrels, but is an entirely outmoded concept. Saying such a thing in the wrong redneck bar in Columbus, GA, could be a huge mistake, of course, because all those soldiers transiting from Fort Benning to the killing fields of Baghdad and Kandahar, and who come home with one leg, or no eyes, or a damaged brain, don't want to hear about this "death of patriotism" stuff, so keep it to yourself, you Berkeley fag-radical.

A conversation to be avoided, at least in that context. Still, the people responsible for sending these soldiers overseas, by an overwhelming majority, do not themselves place their asses on the line, nor those of their close relatives (Bush, Cheney, Obama, Wolfowitz, Rice, Feith, Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly, Coulter et alia ad nauseum). Nor do they actually foment and sustain these wars out of patriotic motives; they're entirely mercenary, the acts of war profiteers or of political opportunists. Sadly, this is the emotional trap, the cover story of an inapt patriotism, which ensnares the military grunts, the ones actually in harm's way. I feel for them. You could say it's my patriotic duty.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I think The Powers That Be in this country essentially use the United States, for want of a less techno-hip word, as a platform for commercial purposes. America is a headquarters country, and the richest use the USA as a base of operations without sinking deep roots into our native soil. They build their factories overseas and they seek to starve their own country of nationality of the tax benefits of their largess (billions in corporate profits are kept permanently overseas so that they can avoid the problem of "repatriating" the money and exposing it to taxation). A compliant Congress builds a tax and regulatory regime which enables all of this unpatriotic activity.

Which is why I don't think a massive restructuring of the tax paradigm is worth the effort anymore. For entirely different reasons from the right wing "small government" freaks, who are primarily interested in dismantling the welfare state so that government's functions can be limited to maintaining the military-industrial complex and bailing out their banks once they screw up again in the course of trying to screw everyone else.

I've become more of a "regional guy," someone who believes the central government apparatus has become too big, too complex and completely unmanageable and unresponsive. These are the reasons I believe that so many Americans feel detached from the nation they grew up in. No matter what the polls show (leave Iraq now, end this decade-long fiasco in Afghanistan, shrink the military, place some rational limit on possession of private Kalashnikovs, give the people some form of socialized medicine we can actually afford, try to keep the ambient air temperature in the sub-100 degree range), the political system remains unswayed. It serves its own interests, not those of the general public.

Most of the things we really need that government provides happen at the local level: schools, fire departments, police, fixing potholes. The federal government has become a very irritating and insanely expensive distraction. So yeah, Grover Norquist: starve The Beast. I'm just picturing something a little bigger and more comprehensive.

Note to GOP: Please, Please Shut the Government Down

It's just that we could all use a break.

The major objection to making them all just shut the hell up and go away for a while is that the Social Security checks which would otherwise be sent out or directly deposited in recipients' accounts on March 10 (the first distribution date after the March 4 expiration of the "continuing resolution" under which these clowns continue their act) will be interrupted. I concede that is a cause for concern, but c'mon, even these brain-dead politicos can surely find a solution to that. The FICA payments will keep coming in; can't someone, just one clerk, stay behind and make sure the mail goes out?

That wasn't so hard, was it? Okay, so the one real problem with disbanding the federal government has been handled.

The beautiful part, the hopeful angle, to the government shut-down is that it will happen unless Congress does something to prevent it. We know how good they are at that kind of thing. These are the same people running a $3.8 trillion operation on a $2.2 trillion budget. As noted, the "continuing resolution" which permits the government to spend money will expire on March 4, which is only 11 (eleven!) days from now. They have to use a "continuing resolution" to begin with because there is no real budget in place, and hasn't been for a very long time (Obama did not propose one for the previous fiscal year) which is to say, the continuing resolution is itself a sign of the extreme dysfunction in Washington's governance. Emblematic of its lack of realism, of its tendency to procrastinate and to act like little children. The GOP wants Obama to enact its meaningless series of token, mean-spirited, Luddite budget cuts, which are all aimed at favorite conservative voodoo dolls, like the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Education, and scientific research, and solar energy, and the rest of their list of Liberal targets. The Democrats resist all of these token gestures in favor of token gestures of their own.

"That's the wrong $30 billion to cut out of the $1.6 trillion deficit!" is the moving battle cry of the Democrats, our liberal heroes. "If we're going to eviscerate government spending by cutting nearly 2% of the budget, excuse me, deficit, then we need to target carefully the budget cuts we choose, because the American people are counting on us to do our jobs!"

They all agree on only one thing: the Department of Defense must have its money.

See what I mean? Are you coming around? Can't they just all take a hike, like the Democrats in Wisconsin did? The Donkeys in Wisconsin went to Illinois; the asses in Washington, D.C. have all fifty states to choose from. Anywhere other than the District of Columbia, which is where they screw everything up.

Do Tom Coburn and John Boehner realize just how much of an Uncle Remus situation this is? Please oh please, Congress, don't throw us into the brier patch of a government shutdown! What would we do without you?

Obama will veto your spending cuts, because he's a man of principle. He believes that if we're going to save money, we should do so by cutting LIHEAP, the assistance to low income families that allows them to avoid hypothermia during the arctic months of winter in the Northeast and Midwest, particularly in those areas which are not reliably Democratic. The O-Man has argued strenuously for slashing this unconscionable waste of money from its present $5 billion to $2.5 billion. Saving this money will allow us to continue nation building in Kandahar, which is where our interests really lie, not in those row houses in Philadelphia where the gas was turned off a month ago and the interior temperature has that same invigorating, chilly zing! as the air outside. Well, who voted for Hillary in the 2008 primary?

So many heroes, so little time to choose. The question is: which side to support? Where should we be spending all that money that Congress needs to borrow in order to spend almost anything? Should we borrow money and spend it on education, or borrow money and spend it on suppressing the Taliban a while longer, since the first decade of suppression hasn't quite done the trick? These people obviously know what they're doing, and I want to be sure they have the tools to do their jobs. But just to give them time to reflect on their priorities, to make sure they "get this right," as they all like to say - maybe they should take off for a couple of years and think it all through. You know?

Whistling past the bankruptcy court

My thinking has been in a state of backwardation lately because I just can't get past this game of charades that Congress and the President are playing concerning the budget. Nomi Prins wrote something kind of funny about it the other day; to wit, two firemen are standing on the sidewalk across the street from a burning house, and they're arguing about whether it would be better to use a teaspoon or a teacup to put the fire out. Think of one as the Democrats, the other as the Republicans, and that captures the essential absurdity. President Obama has talked about eliminating "$1 trillion" from the budget; however, he's talking over the next ten years. The Republicans want to cut $100 billion this year, if they can find some place to start. I'm not seeing the real difference between these two futile gestures.

The impotent paralysis of the federal government in its attempts to grapple with a budget deficit of $1.6 trillion is something to behold. Holograma has put out forecasts of tremendous growth in tax revenues over the next 4 or 5 years, increasing from its current anemic $2.2 trillion to $3.5 trillion in just a few years. This will apparently be accomplished without any real increases in taxation levels; indeed, Obama would be an odd person to lead such a change since he just got through capitulating on large tax decreases in yet a further attempt to ingratiate himself with his Stockholm Syndrome Keepers.

Here's what I think lies at the root of this collective psychosis. The Very Serious People in Washington have themselves convinced that the Depression which engulfed this country in 2007 is simply and only a function of a discrete event, to with, the securitized-mortgage (and related derivatives) meltdown which arrived in its most florid form in the fall of 2008. The financial precariousness of the banks, their inability to lend - these are the things which caused the system to "freeze up" and interrupt the Great American Wealth Creation Machine.

Your faithful diarist, however, has never seen it that way. Here among the quiet, virtual snow banks beside my virtual Pond, it seems rather to me that 2008 (the stock market meltdown really began in the summer of 2007) simply marked the endpoint of America's desperate effort to prop up a false standard of living through the relentless accumulation of unpayable debt. Real wages in this country, for the vast majority of people, have never kept pace with the liabilities assumed or with the standard of living which such debts implied. Things have been moving this way since at least 1973, and all graphs and other empirical evidence point in exactly this direction.

The housing bubble was the last gasp effort of American society to fend off the moment of recognition. The "wealth effect" of house-as-ATM, as store of value, as a substitute for making any freaking money with a job -- this kept the decade of the Aughts going for a while, sustaining the illusion. However, the inability of the populace to service the debts taken on, often in the form of loans which did not represent their real long-term carrying costs, meant that default would become epidemic, and as that happened, the market value of houses suffered a nationwide collapse. All of this has happened against the backdrop of a relentless hollowing out of the manufacturing base which once sustained the middle class, as opposed to the crap jobs of the service economy. In this view, the fall of Wall Street flowed naturally from the default of American society as a whole. None of this is to exonerate the crooks and swindlers who arranged things so that the inevitable meltdown would accelerate, perhaps even overshoot the downside implied in the collapse, and all as part of their orgy of greed. But in a larger sense, the fact that this is the sort of thing we do now to make money, participate in non-productive rackets, is symptomatic of the overall malady.

Obama, Congress, the D.C. Establishment much prefer the Meltdown-as-Interruption thesis to explain away our problems. The $2.2 trillion in national income, in this way of looking at things, is an aberration, a momentary setback, until the juggernaut of the American economy gets underway again. There is no need to scale back federal spending, the $1.6 trillion deficit is workable, the practice of the Federal Reserve in conjuring money out of thin air to buy our own debt -- all these things are just stopgaps until hiring picks up and the economy returns to those halcyon days of 2005. In the meantime, let's just keep spending as we always have, we'll borrow from ourselves if we have to, but in a few years when federal revenues have increased by 75%, this will just be an unpleasant memory.

That, I think, must be the plan. All these Very Serious People are standing around in a circle and telling themselves these things over and over. This is a great country, don't bet against America, we're innovative, entrepreneurial, it's just a matter of time.

Well, what else can they say? The alternative is pretty unthinkable. How do you cut a budget of nearly $4 trillion roughly in half? The really, really weird part is that's actually the point we're at. That's the part that isn't made up. The forecasts, the projections, the political posturing, the speeches, the blame-games, the conjured money, the pretend Treasury auctions-- those are all make-believe. That we're broke - that's the reality.

The breathtaking elegance of national debt financing

It took me a while to catch on, but I think I've figured it out. In his new budget proposals, President Holograma has forecast really awesome numbers for federal revenue over the next few years which will gradually eliminate the deficit and restore America to prosperity. Since I can't really see how this can be accomplished with the materials at hand, you know, just looking around at the jobless situation and rather ungraciously noticing that the actual number of full-time jobs in the US of A is about the same now as in the year 2000 (about 130 million), I'm tempted to ask a question with the same initials as Win The Future, only different. I mean, how can the O-Admin project revenues for the feds of over $3.0 trillion for the fiscal year two years from now, and then rising sharply to $3.5 trillion right after that, when income currently is scraping along the bottom at under $2.2 trillion? That's a 50% increase in revenue in two years, and 75% a few years out!

Then it occurred to me: aside from the fact that Congress, in order to avoid a People's Temple scenario, absolutely needs to believe that such a thing is possible, the Treasury may have an ace up its sleeve. All that debt we're drowning in? Why not put it to work for us?

This is so beautiful it's difficult to write it down cogently, because my mind wants to race ahead to the thrilling conclusion and skip any intermediate steps. It's just that good. But one or two preliminary points: We all know by now that the Federal Reserve Bank has been indulging itself in something called Quantitative Easing for quite some time. They have bought all kinds of stuff, including well over a trillion dollars in mortgage-backed securities (MBS), but lately their focus has been exclusively on buying Treasuries in the "secondary market," primarily, naturally enough, from the Primary Dealers who in many cases did not actually "own" these "assets" which the Federal Reserve "purchased" for much more than a week or so. Using this "asset purchase program," the Fed has become the world's largest holder of Treasury "securities." (I just love all these sophisticated, reasonable, business-like terms in the context of what's obviously a huge Ponzi scheme.)

The Fed now owns well north of $1 trillion of such Treasuries, and under what's euphemistically called Quantitative Easing II, the plan is to keep "purchasing" Treasuries in the "secondary" market at least through June, at which point it will be extended again through QE 3, to QE 4, to QE n, to QE to the Moon. You may think to yourself that this is a somewhat ridiculous situation, for the "money" the Fed uses to "buy" such "assets" is simply a figment of Ben Bernanke's imagination. The "quantities" he's "easing" into existence are hallucinatory. Yet, and here's the beauty shot -- once the Fed "owns" these "securities," they earn "interest" just like everything else. Maybe the Fed "bought" the Treasuries with hallucinated money, but that doesn't mean the Fed isn't entitled to a return on its "investment." And where does the Treasury get the money to pay the Federal Reserve interest, or coupon payments, on the Fed's Treasuries? Glad you asked: from the Fed's program of Quantitative Easing. And to whom or to what is the money remitted to the Fed by the Treasury ultimately paid? Well, to the Treasury, because it's the Fed that holds the Treasury's checking account.

Are you impressed yet? I sure am. Under this program, the deeper the United States Treasury goes into debt, the more money it makes on the investments it makes by buying the debt it just created. Joseph Heller's jaw must be dropping at seeing the imagination of his creation, Milo Minderbinder, one-upped in real life. This is a can't-miss, fool-proof system for national solvency. So of course the federal government's revenues are going to go through the ceiling over the next few years. The federal government will be receiving all that money it owes itself regardless of what the unemployed taxpayers chip in, and the Treasury will be receiving all that income, just to skip a couple of confusing, irrelevant steps, from the money it creates out of thin air.

I don't see any reason the rest of the world's economies should be uneasy about the way we're dealing with Earth's reserve currency, do you? So completely straightforward, fiscally sound, and ingenious. It's one of the many ways we continue to be Exceptional.

The Greenhouse Effect & Fat Tail Distributions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j1KGHOvSkM

Somewhat unAmericanly, when I am interested in scientific data beyond my own cognizance or competence, I find myself consulting sources of information where the people writing about the subject know something, you know, about what the hell they're talking about. This is not actually a bad approach to the arcane and complicated, I find. When in doubt, read something by someone who has studied the subject thoroughly and has come to some honest conclusions about what he or she has looked into. Following such a practice, of course, can place one at odds with the predominant style of opinion-formation in this great land of ours, which might be called blowing it out your barracks bag.

For example, on this global warming issue, which has been relegated to the back burner, so to speak, I read the comments by trolls on various websites and come away with an impression, which is certainly not based on an unskewed sample (because AGW denialists, by their very nature, patrol the vast Internet looking for opportunities to wreak destruction on future generations with a triumphant display of their conventional ignorance and borrowed "gotcha" points, a current favorite being the "solar maximum" argument), and I wonder: does anyone have a simple way to explain the extremes in either direction which seem to be plaguing the world weatherwise? (Today's Secret Word, and I'm sorry Groucho Marx's bird can't drop down to reward you.)

It's been cold and snowy back East this year, although probably not a lot different from the weather which prevailed in the Northeast at the end of "a Little Ice Age" around 1970 (this period of abnormal cold also was present in New England during Thoreau's life there, as reflected in Walden's descriptions of intense cold and deep Pond freezing), so people look at all those snow-blowers and conclude that global warming is a hoax. My own surmise, which is confirmed to a degree by what I read (see above) is that the introduction of all that "forcing energy" in the form of trapped solar infrared radiation would naturally power more violent winds, more copious uptake of ocean evaporation, more of everything, and in cold weather months you would get exactly what we're seeing, blizzards and howling winds, although not necessarily record cold temperatures. All of this happens against a backdrop of an inexorably warming Earth, because there is also no doubt that year after year, the planet is setting records for "warmest year on record, warmest decade on record," et cetera.

The graph above is an elegant depiction of how this works. The bell curve of temperature has been shifted to the right by global warming, reflected as the red curve on the x-axis. The y-axis represents the distribution of weather events, with most of them clustered around the normal range, as is the case (by definition) with bell curves. Along the x-axis, under the fat tails, we can see the effect of skewing the average temperature to the right (warmer). The probabilities of events associated with abnormally warm temperatures (Australia's floods, Russia's epic heat wave destroying 30% of the wheat crop, China's wells going dry), increase in likelihood because the region of distribution (the "fat tails) has been enlarged. Meanwhile, because the average temperature of the Earth has increased on a constant basis, the ongoing problems continue at an accelerating rate (the cascading meltdown of Greenland, Himalayan and South American glaciers, the softening of the tundra, chunks the size of Massachusetts breaking off Antarctica).

It's a kind of dismal consolation, but at least this graphic depiction enables one to grasp why we're seeing the patterns we're seeing. The destruction already caused by AGW seems pretty far advanced, but one can cling to the hope that educated countries outside the theocratically-inclined United States might still organize to do something about it.

How long can bin Laden stay on dialysis?

"Archaeologists originally set the date of the scrolls at 4,000 B.C., or just after the massacre of the Israelites by their benefactors. The writing is a mixture of Sumerian, Aramaic, and Babylonian and seems to have been done by either one man over a long period of time, or several men who shared the same suit. The authenticity of the scrolls is currently in great doubt, particularly since the word “Oldsmobile” appears several times in the text..."

Woody Allen, "The Red Sea Scrolls," from Without Feathers.

No day is completely lost when you can quote Woody Allen. For reasons best known not even to me, I became curious about the current state of the hunt for bin Laden. I know that years and years ago, George W. Bush said something to the effect that "I don't really think about it that much," when asked where bin Laden was; but W never really evinced thinking about much at all, so I don't know how definitive that is. I thought there must be more to the story. After all, when you think about it, bin Laden was the occasion for Bush to use the phrase "casus belli" in a press conference. I remember the sly grin on his face when he said those words. You could tell he was pretty sure the half-wits in the press corps probably didn't know what he meant - a chance for George to throw some Latin around at their expense! I was proud of him, I really was. He overdid it when he started using the phrase again in relation to Iraq, but that's another story.

Well anyway, the casus belli for Afghanistan was a meticulously constructed argument built upon the following premises:

1. Osama bin Laden was the mastermind behind 9/11.

2. OBL lived in Afghanistan, Kandahar to be exact, and the Taliban "harbored" him, thus enabling OBL to plan "further attacks," using the Fiendish Jungle Gym Complex at his camp.

3. Anyone harboring terrorists is with the terrorists under the Bush doctrine that you are either with Bush or against him (echoing things he heard every Sunday at United Baptist: "I would that ye were either hot or cold, for if ye be lukewarm, I will spew thee out of my mouth.").

4. We must therefore invade Afghanistan, depose the Taliban, and install someone like Hamid Karzai, former PR man for Union Oil and current heroin dealer.

There may be some causal links in there confounding the "belli" part, but I think that's pretty close. Just about an airtight case, any way you look at it. Some caveats were noted:

A. Bin Laden himself denied any involvement in 9/11.

B. The Taliban, who had previously met with Cheney & others in Texas for a barbecue to discuss the construction of a Union Oil pipeline across Afghanistan (prior to W's ascension to the Bush Throne), asked for, but apparently did not receive, some sort of definitive proof that OBL was actually involved.

C. No one involved in 9/11 was actually from Afghanistan. They were all from Arab countries, principally Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE, and the mastermind was probably Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Gurgling Confessor of waterboarding fame, who was only too glad, between swallows, to finger OBL as much as the CIA wanted. Indeed, there seems to be a substantial pesonnel overlap between 9/11 and the Bojinka Plot and the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.

But what the hell do I know? I do sometimes think, however, that one problem with a certain vintage of the Baby Boom set (among whose number you can count me and W) is that we were overexposed to the Dick&Jane primers in grammar school, and as a result a kind of infantilization of logical processes took root in the cerebral cortex and has controlled our thinking ever since. This theory, again, will make people forget neither Godel nor Boltzmann but it's maybe something to think about. That list of 1 through 4, supra, is suggestive of this weakening of the analytical faculties, because, really, that list just doesn't make any frigging sense whatsoever. And when you think that we have waged a war that has lasted almost ten years on the basis of that list, then perhaps you know all you need to know about the state of the nation, circa turn of the Millenium.

Nevertheless, I got to thinking again about the Arch-Nemesis, the Mastermind, the Lex Luthor of the Neocons' perfervid nightmares: Osama bin Laden. And it occurred to me: ten years is a long time to be on dialysis in a cave in the mountains of Tora Bora. So I Googled the Dude. The consensus of opinion turns out to be that he died on December 13, 2001, in Tora Bora, of complications from acute kidney failure. Among the people holding this view are Robert Baer, the highly-quotable ex-CIA agent who is a persistent critic of America's anti-terrorist wars; former Pakistan "President" Pervez Musharraf; the aforemention Hamid Karzai; Donald Rumsfeld, when you get right down to it; Dale Watson, head of the FBI's Counter-Terrorism division; the Israeli Mossad; and lots and lots of other people. Were you aware of this general trend in thinking?

But haven't there been videos of bin Laden after December 13, 2001? Highly debatable. There is strong evidence that a "double" appears in those videos, including the famous one where bin Laden sits and discusses the fine points of the 9/11 attacks. Cynics have noted that bin Laden referred to melting "iron" in the Twin Towers, while a person trained in engineering (as bin Laden was) would have known the towers were built of steel, not iron. Plus, he appears to write something with his right hand in the video, and bin Laden was left-handed, not to mention that the person appearing in these videos is darker than OBL, with a black (not salt-and-pepper) beard, and with a broader and flatter nose.

All "9-11 conspiracy" stuff? What's harder to believe is that an abnormally tall Arab could actually make his way around in mountainous terrain for a decade tethered to a dialysis machine, with a $50 million price on his head, and not attract some attention, somewhere, somehow. Yet what is most astounding to me is why the press has never really zoomed in on this story and figured it out. Leaving aside the invasion of Iraq, which was a foreign policy aberration of George W. Bush and had nothing to do with the "war on terror," the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is built wholly and solely on the association of bin Laden with that country. So if the guy died within a couple of months of our invasion, isn't that, you know, newsworthy? Just how lame are the Mainstream Media?

I suppose if Elvis is still alive, then bin Laden might be too. Driving around somewhere in Waziristan in his vintage Oldsmobile.